The post-Renaissance world saw the nation-state mature and confront the issue of how to control the lives of its citizens. Two models of political organization, democratic and authoritarian, gradually developed. During the twentieth century, as some nations granted individuals and groups more and more rights, ideology and modern technology enabled authoritarian governments to gain ever more control, until community interest dominated the individual and totalitarianism was born. Although Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union have passed into history and there are cracks in the total control of the People's Republic of China, North Korea still retains all of the characteristics of totalitarianism. Still technically at war with the United Nations Forces, it poses a threat to the world at large with its developing nuclear program. At the same time it continues to threaten its perceived enemies. Very few foreigners have been able to visit and record life in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (the official name of North Korea), and the nation remains largely unknown to outsiders. This lesson will begin with an introductory activity that draws on students' prior knowledge to discuss, 'How does a society create social and political order?' After brainstorming the characteristics of totalitarianism, the class will be divided into groups to locate historical examples and create a Document Based Question to share with their classmates. Students will next examine excerpts from the WIDE ANGLE film 'A State of Mind' (2003) to see how the characteristics of totalitarian societies still operate today in North Korea. As a culminating activity, students will analyze editorials on North Korea's nuclear program from newspapers around the world, formulate their own opinions, and write a Letter to the Editor of their local newspaper.

Since the mid-l970s, economic reforms have transformed China from one of the most egalitarian societies into one of the most unequal in the world. Wide disparities currently exist between the income levels of a relatively few rich and middle-class Chinese and their fellow citizens who number in the hundreds of millions. This "wealth gap" is particularly acute when one compares the incomes of urban and rural residents, between Chinese living in the interior of the country and those living in the rapidly developing cities on China's eastern coast.The causes of the growing income gap include previous governmental policies that favored city dwellers over farmers, the uneven regional patterns of foreign investment, and the massive outflow of displaced farmers to China's already overcrowded cities in pursuit of manufacturing jobs.Recently, the Chinese government, in recognition of the potential for social instability, and in the face of growing unrest amongst China's poor, has made the elimination of economic and social inequalities a top priority. Plans are in motion to build a more "harmonious society" through the delivery of improved educational and health services to those who appear to have been left behind in China's rush to modernize its economy.This lesson, using clips from the WIDE ANGLE film "To Have and Have Not" (2002), can be used after a lesson on the Communist Revolution and Mao's rule. A basic knowledge of China's geography, of the tenets of Chinese Communism, and of Mao's efforts to redirect the course of China's future by means of the Cultural Revolution, is required for the successful completion of the lesson.

The course covers British literature and culture during Queen Victoria's long reign, 1837-1901. This was the brilliant age of Charles Dickens, the Brontës, Lewis Carroll, George Eliot, Robert Browning, Oscar Wilde, Arthur Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling, Alfred, Lord Tennyson – and many others. It was also the age of urbanization, steam power, class conflict, Darwin, religious crisis, imperial expansion, information explosion, bureaucratization – and much more.